In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online

up. I had no method as the others seemed to have, no way of knowing in advance where to go, no sense of what would be where and when. It takes years of living in the city to get to that point, and I was only a novice, an ignorant newcomer who could barely find her way from one census zone to the next.
    Still, I was not a total failure. I had my legs, after all, and a certain youthful enthusiasm to keep me going, even when the prospects were less than encouraging. I scampered around in breathless surges, dodging the dangerous byways and toll mounds, careening fitfully from one street to another, never failing to hope for some extraordinary find around the next corner. It is an odd thing, I believe, to be constantly looking down at the ground, always searching for broken and discarded things. After a while, it must surely affect the brain. For nothing is really itself anymore. There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together. And yet, very strangely, at the limit of all this chaos, everything begins to fuse again. A pulverized apple and a pulverized orange are finally the same thing, aren’t they? You can’t tell the difference between a good dress and a bad dress if they’re both torn to shreds, can you? At a certain point, things disintegrate into muck, or dust, or scraps, and what you have is something new, some particle or agglomeration of matter that cannot be identified. It is a clump, a mote, a fragment of the worldthat has no place: a cipher of it-ness. As an object hunter, you must rescue things before they reach this state of absolute decay. You can never expect to find something whole—for that is an accident, a mistake on the part of the person who lost it—but neither can you spend your time looking for what is totally used up. You hover somewhere in between, on the lookout for things that still retain a semblance of their original shape—even if their usefulness is gone. What another has seen fit to throw away, you must examine, dissect, and bring back to life. A piece of string, a bottle-cap, an undamaged board from a bashed-in crate—none of these things should be neglected. Everything falls apart, but not every part of every thing, at least not at the same time. The job is to zero in on these little islands of intactness, to imagine them joined to other such islands, and those islands to still others, and thus to create new archipelagoes of matter. You must salvage the salvageable and learn to ignore the rest. The trick is to do it as fast as you can.
    Little by little, my hauls became almost adequate. Odds and ends, of course, but a few totally unexpected things as well: a collapsible telescope with one cracked lens; a rubber Frankenstein mask; a bicycle wheel; a Cyrillic typewriter missing only five keys and the space bar; the passport of a man named Quinn. These treasures made up for some of the bad days, and as time went on I began doing well enough at the Resurrection Agents’ to leave my nest egg untouched. I might have done better, I think, but there were certain lines I drew within myself, limits I refused to step beyond. Touching the dead, for example. Stripping corpses is one of the most profitable aspects of scavenging,and there are few object hunters who do not pounce at the chance. I kept telling myself that I was a fool, a squeamish little rich girl who didn’t want to live, but nothing really helped. I tried. Once or twice I even got close—but when it came right down to it, I didn’t have the courage. I remember an old man and an adolescent girl: crouching down beside them, letting my hands get near their bodies, trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. And then, on Lampshade Road one day, early in the morning, a small boy of about six. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s not that I felt proud of myself for having made some deep moral decision—I just didn’t have it in me to go that far.
    Another thing that hurt me was that I stuck to