Report from the Interior by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online Page B

even when you told the truth, there were those who would refuse to believe you, simply as a matter of principle. You were trusting and openhearted, you always began by assuming the best about others, and more often than not those attitudes were reciprocated by others, which led to many warm friendships when you were a child, and therefore it was especially hard on you when you crossed paths with the occasional mean-spirited boy, a person who rejected the rules of fair-mindedness that you and your friends lived by, who took pleasure in discord and conflict for their own sake. You are talking about ethical conduct here, not just good manners or the social benefits of polite behavior, but something more fundamental than that, the moral bedrock on which everything stands—and without which everything falls. To your mind, there was no greater injustice than to be doubted when you had told the truth, to be called a liar when you hadn’t lied, for there was no recourse then, no way to defend your integrity in the face of your accuser, and the frustration caused by such a moral injury would burn deep into you, continue to burn into you, becoming a fire that could never be extinguished. Your first run-in with that sort of frustration occurred when you were five, during the summer of the heroic Lenny, the smallest of small disputes with another boy at the day camp you attended, so small as to qualify as ridiculously small, but you were a small boy then and the world you lived in was by definition small, and why else would you remember this incident if it hadn’t felt large to you at the time, enormous in its impact, and by that you are referring not to the dispute itself, which was inconsequential, but to the outrage you felt afterward, the sense of betrayal that overwhelmed you when you told the truth and were not believed. The circumstances, such as you remember them—and you remember them well—were as follows: the boys in your group were making preparations for some kind of Indian pageant that was to be staged on the last day of the summer camp session, and among the things you were all supposed to do was construct a ceremonial rattle for the occasion, which consisted of ornamenting a can of Calumet baking powder with several colors of paint, filling the can with dried beans or pebbles, and pushing a stick through a hole in the bottom of the can to serve as a handle. The Calumet can was red, you recall, with a splendid portrait of an Indian chief in profile dominating the front, and you worked diligently on your project, you who had never excelled at art, but this time the results surpassed your expectations, your painted decorations were neat and precise and beautiful, and you felt proud of what you had accomplished. Of all the ceremonial rattles produced by the boys that day, yours was one of the best, if not the very best, but time ran out before anyone could put the finishing touches on the job, which meant that the work would have to be picked up again first thing the following morning. You missed the next day of camp because of a cold, however, and perhaps the day after that as well, and when you finally returned it was the last day, the morning of the pageant. You searched high and low for your masterpiece, but you couldn’t find it, slowly understanding as you sifted through the pile that one of the boys had filched it in your absence. A counselor (not Lenny) pulled another rattle out of the box and told you to use that one instead, which needless to say disappointed you, for this substitute rattle had been done poorly and sloppily, it couldn’t compare with the one you had made, but now you were stuck with this embarrassing piece of work, which everyone would assume you had decorated yourself, and as you marched off to take part in the pageant, you found yourself walking beside a boy named Michael, who was a year older than you were and had been subtly taunting you for the entire summer, treating you as a