Oracle Night by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online

with his life that I almost envied him for it.
    ‘So there we were, eating an unremarkable dinner in an unremarkable midtown restaurant, talking about nothing of any great importance, when Richard suddenly looked up from his plate and began to tell me a story. That’s why I’ve been telling you all this – in order to get to Richard’s story. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but it strikes me as one of the most interesting things I’ve heard in a long time.
    ‘Three or four months ago, Richard was in his garage at home, looking for something in a cardboard box, when he came across an old 3-D viewer. He vaguely remembered that his parents had bought it when he was a kid, but he couldn’t recall the circumstances or what they’d used it for. Unless he’d blanked out the experience, he was fairly certain he’d never looked through it, had never even held it in his hands. When he lifted it out of the box and started to examine it, he saw that it wasn’t one of those cheap, flimsy things used for looking at ready-made pictures of tourist sites and pretty scenery. It was a solid, well-built optical instrument, a prize relic from the 3-D craze of the early fifties. The fad didn’t last long, but the idea was to take your own 3-D pictures with a special camera, develop them as slides, and then look at them through the viewer, which served as a kind of three-dimensional photo album. The camera was missing, but Richard found a box of slides. There were just twelve of them, he said, which seemed to suggest his parents had shot only one roll of film with their novelty camera – and then had stowed it away somewhere and forgotten all about it.
    ‘Not knowing what to expect, Richard put one of the slides in the viewer, pressed down on the background illuminator button, and had a look. In one instant, he said, thirty years of his life were erased. It was 1953, and he was in the living room of his family’s house in West Orange, New Jersey, standing among the guests at Tina’s sixteenth birthday party. He remembered everything now: the Sweet Sixteen bash, the caterers unpacking their food in the kitchen and lining up champagne glasses on the counter, the ringing of the doorbell, the music, the din of voices, the chignon knot in Tina’s hair, the whooshing of her long yellow dress. One by one, he put each slide in the viewer and looked at all twelve of them. Everyone was there, he said. His mother and father, his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his sister, his sister’s friends, and even himself, a scrawny fourteen-year-old with his protruding Adam’s apple, flattop haircut, and red clip-on bow tie. It wasn’t like looking at normal photographs, he explained. It wasn’t even like looking at home movies – which always disappoint you with their jerky images and washed-out colors, their sense of belonging to the remote past. The 3-D pictures were incredibly well preserved, supernaturally sharp. Everyone in them looked alive, brimming with energy, present in the moment, a part of some eternal now that had gone on perpetuating itself for close to thirty years. Intense colors, the minutest details shining in utmost clarity, and an illusion of surrounding space, of depth. The longer he looked at the slides, Richard said, the more he felt that he could see the figures breathing, and every time he stopped and went on to the next one, he had the impression that if he’d looked a little longer – just one more moment – they actually would have started to move.
    ‘After he’d looked at each slide once, he looked at them all again, and the second time around it gradually occurred to him that most of the people in the pictures were now dead. His father, killed by a heart attack in 1969. His mother, killed by kidney failure in 1972. Tina, killed by cancer in 1974. And of his six aunts and uncles in attendance that day, four of them dead and buried as well. In one picture, he was standing on the front lawn with his