Free Moon Palace by Paul Auster Page A

myself in there (the words were too muffled for her to make them out), and then, very abruptly, it seems that I started to sing—a crazy, tuneless kind of singing, she said—but I do not remember that at all. She knocked again, but again I stayed where I was. Not wanting to make a nuisance of herself, she finally gave up and left.
    That was how Kitty explained it to me. It sounded plausible enough at first, but once I started to think about it, her story grew less convincing. “I still don’t understand why you came,” I said. “We had only met each other that one time, and I couldn’t have meant anything to you then. Why would you go to all that trouble for someone you didn’t even know?”
    Kitty turned her eyes away from me and looked down at the floor. “Because you were my brother,” she said, very quietly.
    “That was just a joke. People don’t put themselves out like that for the sake of a joke.”
    “No, I guess not,” she said, giving a small shrug. I thought she was going to continue, but several seconds went by, and she did not say anything more.
    “Well?” I said. “Why did you do it?”
    She looked up at me for a brief moment, then fixed her eyes on the floor again. “Because I thought you were in danger,” she said. “I thought you were in danger, and I had never felt so sorry for anyone in my life.”
    She went back to my apartment the following day, but I wasalready gone by then. The door was ajar, however, and as she pushed it open and stepped across the threshold, she found Fernandez whirling around the room, angrily stuffing my things into plastic garbage bags and cursing under his breath. As Kitty described it, he looked like someone trying to clean out the room of a man who had just died of the plague: moving swiftly in a panic of revulsion, barely even touching my belongings for fear they might infect him. She asked Fernandez if he knew where I had gone, but there wasn’t much he could tell her. I was a crazy, fucked-up son of a bitch, he said, and if he knew anything about anything, I was probably crawling off somewhere to look for a hole to die in. Kitty left at that point, went back down to the street, and called Zimmer from the first telephone booth she found. His new apartment was on Bank Street in the West Village, but when he heard what she had to tell him, he dropped what he was doing and rushed uptown to meet her. That was how I finally came to be rescued: because the two of them went out and looked for me. I was not aware of it at the time, of course, but knowing what I know now, it is impossible for me to look back on those days without feeling a surge of nostalgia for my friends. In some sense, it alters the reality of what I experienced. I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
    I had no clear idea of what I was going to do. When I left my apartment on the first morning, I simply started walking, going wherever my steps decided to take me. If I had any thought atall, it was to let chance determine what happened, to follow the path of impulse and arbitrary events. My first steps went south, and so I continued to go south, realizing after one or two blocks that it would probably be best to leave my neighborhood anyway. Note how pride weakened my resolve to stand aloof from my misery, pride and a sense of shame. A part of me was appalled by what I had allowed to happen to myself, and I did not want to run the risk of seeing anyone I knew. Walking