Paul Auster and Leviathan receive rave reviews
“Auster’s most accessible, engaging book. He treats us to his best clear-eyed prose.”
—The New York Times Magazine
“Brisk and compelling … Auster’s powerful narrative engine keeps us reading and rushing toward a breathless conclusion.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Paul Auster’s novels are beautifully designed artifacts, intellectual puzzles dedicated to the proposition that life is a mystery ruled by chaos and chance. In counterpoint to their message, they are propelled by the most fluid and graceful of prose styles.”
—New York Newsday
“Unnerving … Contains occasional patches of gorgeous prose, but more often the style is deliberately spare, a stainless steel string for all the gaudy narrative prose.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Auster’s sleight of hand imbues his work with a haunting sense of the uncanny.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Contains bounties of intelligence, mystery and literary magic sufficient to nourish and delight the mind.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“The allure of Auster’s elegant plotting, the play of his ideas, and the sensuous pleasure of his prose keep us firmly hooked.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A master of the modern novel … Auster combines good old-fashioned mystery narratives with intensely literary forms.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“Compelling, exhilarating … Literary art can work some powerful magic after all.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Suspenseful and meditative … blends a crime story with a thoughtful examination of important psychological and moral questions.”
—Library Journal
PENGUIN BOOKS
LEVIATHAN
PAUL AUSTER is the author of the novels The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan (awarded the 1993 Prix Medicis Étranger), The Music of Chance (nominated for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award), Moon Palace, In the Country of Last Things, and the three novels known as “The New York Trilogy”: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. He has also written two memoirs (The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth), a collection of essays, and a volume of poems, and edited the book I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project. Auster was the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. He has won literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and prose, and in 1990 received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote the screenplays for Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge, which he also directed. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The author extends special thanks to Sophie Calle for permission to mingle Fact with fiction.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1992
Published in Penguin Books 1993
30
Copyright © Paul Auster, 1992
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:
Auster, Paul, 1947–
Leviathan/Paul Auster.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-670-84676-7 (hc.)
ISBN 978-0-14-017813-5 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3551.U77L48 1992
813’.54—dc20 92-1282
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Garamond No. 3
Designed by Cheryl L. Cipriani
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
For the Best in Paperbacks, Look for the
for Don DeLillo
Every actual State is corrupt.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
LEVIATHAN
1
Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off. According to the forensic reports that have just been published, the man was killed instantly. His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his corpse were found as far as fifty feet away from the site of the explosion. As of today (July 4, 1990), no one seems to have any idea who the dead man was. The FBI, working along with the local police and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, began their investigation by looking into the car, a seven-year-old blue Dodge with Illinois license plates, but they quickly learned that it had been stolen—filched in broad daylight from a Joliet parking lot on June 12. The same thing happened when they examined the contents of the man’s wallet, which by some miracle had come through the explosion more or less unscathed. They thought they had stumbled onto a wealth of clues—driver’s license, Social Security number, credit cards—but once they fed these documents into the computer, each one turned out to have been either forged or stolen. Fingerprints would have been the next step, but in this case there were no fingerprints, since the man’s hands had been obliterated by the bomb. Nor was the car of any help to them. The Dodge had been turned into a mass of charred steel and melted plastic, and in spite of their efforts, not a single print could be found on it. Perhaps they’ll have more luck with his teeth, assuming there are enough teeth to work with, but that’s bound to take some time, perhaps as l
ong as several months. In the end, there’s no doubt they’ll think of something, but until they can establish the identity of their mangled victim, their case has little chance of getting off the ground.
As far as I’m concerned, the longer it takes them the better. The story I have to tell is rather complicated, and unless I finish it before they come up with their answer, the words I’m about to write will mean nothing. Once the secret is out, all sorts of lies are going to be told, ugly distortions will circulate in the newspapers and magazines, and within a matter of days a man’s reputation will be destroyed. It’s not that I want to defend what he did, but since he’s no longer in a position to defend himself, the least I can do is explain who he was and give the true story of how he happened to be on that road in northern Wisconsin. That’s why I have to work fast: to be ready for them when the moment comes. If by some chance the mystery remains unsolved, I’ll simply hold on to what I have written, and no one will need to know a thing about it. That would be the best possible outcome: a perfect standstill, not one word spoken by either side. But I mustn’t count on that. In order to do what I have to do, I have to assume they’re already closing in on him, that sooner or later they’re going to find out who he was. And not just when I’ve had enough time to finish this—but at any moment, at any moment beginning now.
The day after the explosion, the wire services ran a brief article about the case. It was one of those cryptic, two-paragraph stories they bury in the middle of the paper, but I happened to catch it in The New York Times while I was eating lunch that afternoon. Almost inevitably, I began to think about Benjamin Sachs. There was nothing in the article that pointed to him in any definite way, and yet at the same time everything seemed to fit. We hadn’t talked in close to a year, but he had said enough during our last conversation to convince me that he was in deep trouble, rushing headlong toward some dark, unnameable disaster. If that’s too vague, I should add that he mentioned bombs as well, that he talked about them endlessly during his visit, and for the next eleven months I had walked around with just such a fear inside me—that he was going to kill himself, that one day I would open the newspaper and read that my friend had blown himself up. It was no more than a wild intuition at that point, one of those insane leaps into the void, and yet once the thought entered my head, I couldn’t get rid of it. Then, two days after I ran across the article, a pair of FBI agents came knocking at my door. The moment they announced who they were, I understood that I was right. Sachs was the man who had blown himself up. There couldn’t be any question about it. Sachs was dead, and the only way I could help him now was to keep his death to myself.
It was probably fortunate that I read the article when I did, although I remember wishing at the time that I hadn’t seen it. If nothing else, it gave me a couple of days to absorb the shock. When the FBI men showed up here to ask their questions, I was already prepared for them, and that helped me to keep myself under control. It also didn’t hurt that an extra forty-eight hours had gone by before they managed to track me down. Among the objects recovered from Sachs’s wallet, it seems there was a slip of paper bearing my initials and telephone number. That was how they came to be looking for me, but as luck would have it, the number was for my telephone back home in New York, and for the past ten days I’ve been in Vermont, living with my family in a rented house where we plan to spend the rest of the summer. God knows how many people they had to talk to before they discovered I was here. If I mention in passing that this house is owned by Sachs’s ex-wife, it is only to give one example of how tangled and complicated this story finally is.
I did my best to play dumb for them, to give away as little as I could. No, I said, I hadn’t read the article in the paper. I didn’t know anything about bombs or stolen cars or back-country roads in Wisconsin. I was a writer, I said, a man who wrote novels for a living, and if they wanted to check into who I was, they could go right ahead—but it wasn’t going to help them with their case, they’d only be wasting their time. Probably so, they said, but what about the slip of paper in the dead man’s wallet? They weren’t trying to accuse me of anything, but the fact that he’d been carrying around my telephone number seemed to prove there was a connection between us. I had to admit that, didn’t I? Yes, I said, of course I did, but just because it looked like that didn’t mean it was true. There were a thousand ways that man could have gotten hold of my number. I had friends scattered all over the world, and any one of them could have passed it on to a stranger. Perhaps that stranger had passed it on to another stranger, who in turn had passed it on to yet another stranger. Perhaps, they said, but why would anyone carry around the telephone number of a person he didn’t know? Because I’m a writer, I said. Oh? they said, and what difference does that make? Because my books are published, I said. People read them, and I don’t have any idea who they are. Without even knowing it, I enter the lives of strangers, and for as long as they have my book in their hands, my words are the only reality that exists for them. That’s normal, they said, that’s the way it is with books. Yes, I said, that’s the way it is, but sometimes these people turn out to be crazy. They read your book, and something about it strikes a chord deep in their soul. All of a sudden, they imagine that you belong to them, that you’re the only friend they have in the world. To illustrate my point, I gave them several examples—all of them true, all of them taken directly from my own experience. The unbalanced letters, the telephone calls at three o’clock in the morning, the anonymous threats. Just last year, I continued, I discovered that someone had been impersonating me—answering letters in my name, walking into bookstores and autographing my books, hovering like some malignant shadow around the edges of my life. A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen. All kinds of mischief can be caused, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. For better or worse, it’s completely out of your control.
I don’t know if they found my denials convincing or not. I tend to think not, but even if they didn’t believe a word I said, it’s possible that my strategy bought me some time. Considering that I had never spoken to an FBI agent before, I don’t feel too bad about the way I handled myself during the interview. I was calm, I was polite, I managed to project the proper combination of helpfulness and bafflement. That alone was something of a triumph for me. Generally speaking, I don’t have much talent for deception, and in spite of my efforts over the years, I’ve rarely fooled anyone about anything. If I managed to turn in a creditable performance the day before yesterday, the FBI men were at least partially responsible for it. It wasn’t anything they said so much as how they looked, the way they dressed for their roles with such perfection, confirming in every detail the way I had always imagined FBI men should look: the lightweight summer suits, the sturdy brogans, the wash-and-wear shirts, the aviator sunglasses. These were the obligatory sunglasses, so to speak, and they lent an artificial quality to the scene, as if the men who wore them were merely actors, walk-ons hired to play a bit part in some low-budget movie. All this was oddly comforting to me, and when I look back on it now, I understand how this sense of unreality worked to my advantage. It allowed me to think of myself as an actor as well, and because I had become someone else, I suddenly had the right to deceive them, to lie without the slightest twinge of conscience.
They weren’t stupid, however. One was in his early forties, and the other was a good deal younger, perhaps as young as twenty-five or twenty-six, but they both had a certain look in their eyes that kept me on my guard the whole time they were here. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what was so menacing about that look, but I think it had something to do with its blankness, its refusal to commit itself, as if it were watching everything and nothing at the same time. So little was divulged by that look, I could never be sure what either of those men was thinking. Their eyes were too patient, somehow, too skilled at suggesting indifference, but for all that they were alert, relentlessy alert in fact, as if they
had been trained to make you feel uncomfortable, to make you conscious of your flaws and transgressions, to make you squirm in your skin. Their names were Worthy and Harris, but I forget which one was which. As physical specimens, they were disturbingly alike, almost as if they were younger and older versions of the same person: tall, but not too tall; well built, but not too well built; sandy hair, blue eyes, thick hands with impeccably clean fingernails. It’s true that their conversational styles were different, but I don’t want to make too much of first impressions. For all I know they take turns, switching roles back and forth whenever they feel like it. For my visit two days ago, the young one played the heavy. His questions were very blunt, and he seemed to take his job too much to heart, rarely cracking a smile, for example, and treating me with a formality that sometimes verged on sarcasm and irritation. The old one was more relaxed and amiable, readier to let the conversation take its natural course. He’s no doubt more dangerous because of that, but I have to admit that talking to him wasn’t entirely unpleasant. When I began to tell him about some of the crackpot responses to my books, I could see that the subject interested him, and he let me go on with my digression longer than I would have expected. I suppose he was feeling me out, encouraging me to ramble on so he could get some sense of who I was and how my mind worked, but when I came to the business about the imposter, he actually offered to start an investigation into the problem for me. That might have been a trick, of course, but I somehow doubt it. I don’t need to add that I turned him down, but if the circumstances had been any different, I probably would have thought twice about accepting his help. It’s something that has plagued me for a long time now, and I would dearly love to get to the bottom of it.
“I don’t read many novels,” the agent said. “I never seem to have time for them.”
“No, not many people do,” I said.