Oracle Night by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online Page A

parents and Tina. It was just the four of them – arms linked, leaning into one another, a row of four smiling faces, ridiculously animated, mugging for the camera – and when Richard put that one into the viewer for the second time, his eyes suddenly filled with tears. That was the one that did him in, he said, the one that was too much for him. He was standing on the lawn with three ghosts, he realized, the only survivor from that afternoon thirty years ago, and once the tears started, there was nothing he could do to stop them. He put down the viewer, lifted his hands over his face, and began to sob. That was the word he used when he told me the story: sob . ‘I sobbed my guts out,’ he said. ‘I completely lost it.’
    ‘This was Richard, remember – a man with no poetry in him, a man with the sensitivity of a doorknob – and yet once he found those pictures, he couldn’t think about anything else. The viewer was a magic lantern that allowed him to travel through time and visit the dead. He would look at the pictures in the morning before he left for work, and he would look at them in the evening after he came home. Always in the garage, always by himself, always away from his wife and children – obsessively returning to that afternoon in 1953, unable to get enough of it. The spell lasted for two months, and then one morning Richard went into the garage and the viewer didn’t work. The machine had jammed up, and he couldn’t depress the button anymore to turn on the light. He’d probably used it too much, he said, and since he didn’t know how to fix it, he assumed the adventure was over, that the marvelous thing he’d discovered had been taken away from him for good. It was a catastrophic loss, the cruelest of deprivations. He couldn’t even look at the slides by holding them up to the light. Three-D pictures aren’t conventional photographs, and you need the viewer to translate them into coherent images. No viewer, no image. No image, no more time travel into the past. No more time travel, no more joy. Another round of grief, another round of sorrow – as if, after bringing them back to life, he had to bury the dead all over again.
    ‘That was the situation when I saw him two weeks ago. The machine was broken, and Richard was still trying to come to grips with what had happened to him. I can’t tell you how touched I was by his story. To see this bumbling, ordinary man turned into a philosophical dreamer, an anguished soul longing for the unattainable. I told him I’d do anything I could to help. This is New York, I said, and since everything in the world can be found in New York, there has to be someone in the city who can fix it. Richard was a little embarrassed by my enthusiasm, but he thanked me for the offer, and that was where we left it. The next morning, I got busy. I called around, did some research, and within a day or two I’d tracked down the owner of a camera shop on West Thirty-first Street who thought he could do it. Richard was back in Florida by then, and when I called him that night to tell him the news, I thought he’d be excited, that we’d immediately start talking about how to pack up the viewer and ship it to New York. But there was a long pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t know, John,” Richard finally said. “I’ve thought about it a lot since I saw you, and maybe it’s not such a good idea for me to be looking at those pictures all the time. Arlene was getting pretty upset, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to the girls. Maybe it’s better this way. You have to live in the present, right? The past is past, and no matter how much time I spend with those pictures, I’m never going to get it back.”’
    That was the end of the story. A disappointing end, John felt, but Grace disagreed with him. After communing with the dead for two months, Richard had put himself in danger, she said, and was perhaps running the risk of falling into a serious