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

prefer to keep an open mind. Without knowledge, one can neither hope nor despair. The best one can do is doubt, and under the circumstances doubt is a great blessing.
    Even if William is not in the city, he could be somewhere else. This country is enormous, you understand, and there’s no telling where he might have gone. Beyond the agricultural zone to the west, there are supposedly several hundred miles of desert. Beyond that, however, one hears talk ofmore cities, of mountain ranges, of mines and factories, of vast territories stretching all the way to a second ocean. Perhaps there is some truth to this talk. If so, William might well have tried his luck in one of those places. I am not forgetting how difficult it is to leave the city, but we both know what William was like. If there was the slightest possibility of getting out, he would have found a way.
    I never told you this, but some time during my last week at home, I met with the editor of William’s newspaper. It must have been three or four days before I said good-bye to you, and I avoided mentioning it because I did not want us to have another argument. Things were bad enough as they were, and it only would have spoiled those last moments we had together. Don’t be angry with me now, I beg you. I don’t think I could stand it.
    The editor’s name was Bogat—a bald, big-bellied man with old-fashioned suspenders and a watch in his fob pocket. He made me think of my grandfather: overworked, licking the tips of his pencils before he wrote, exuding an air of abstracted benevolence that seemed tinged with cunning, a pleasantness that masked some secret edge of cruelty. I waited nearly an hour in the reception room. When he was finally ready to see me, he led me by the elbow into his office, sat me down in his chair, and listened to my story. I must have talked for five or ten minutes before he interrupted me. William had not sent a dispatch for over nine months, he said. Yes, he understood that the machines were broken in the city, but that was beside the point. A good reporter always manages to file his story—and William had been his best man. A silence of nine months could only mean one thing: William had run into trouble, and he would not be coming back. Very blunt, no beating around thebush. I shrugged my shoulders and told him that he was only guessing.
    “Don’t do it, little girl,” he said. “You’d be crazy to go there.”
    “I’m not a little girl,” I said. “I’m nineteen years old, and I can take care of myself better than you think.”
    “I don’t care if you’re a hundred. No one gets out of there. It’s the end of the goddamned world.”
    I knew he was right. But I had made up my mind, and nothing was going to force me to change it. Seeing my stubbornness, Bogat began to modify his tactics.
    “Look,” he said, “I sent another man over there about a month ago. I should be getting word from him soon. Why not wait until then? You could get all your answers without having to leave.”
    “What does that have to do with my brother?”
    “William is a part of the story, too. If this reporter does his job, he’ll find out what happened to him.”
    But it wasn’t going to wash, and Bogat knew it. I held my ground, determined to fend off his smug paternalism, and little by little he seemed to give up. Without my asking for it, he gave me the name of the new reporter, and then, as a last gesture, opened the drawer of a filing cabinet behind his desk and pulled out a photograph of a young man.
    “Maybe you should take this along with you,” he said, tossing it onto the desk. “Just in case.”
    It was a picture of the reporter. I gave it a brief glance and then slipped it into my bag to oblige him. That was the end of our talk. The meeting had been a standoff, with neither one of us giving in to the other. I think Bogat was both angry and a little impressed.

    “Just remember that I told you so,” he said.
    “I won’t forget,” I