Free Oracle Night by Paul Auster

falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away.’
    I didn’t have to approve of Bowen’s actions in order to write about them. Bowen was Flitcraft, and Flitcraft had done the same thing to his own wife in Hammett’s novel. That was the premise of the story, and I wasn’t about to back down from the bargain I’d made with myself to stick to the premise of the story. At the same time, I understood that there was more to it than just Bowen and what happens to him after he boards the plane. There was Eva to consider as well, and no matter how wrapped up I became in following Nick’s adventures in Kansas City, I wouldn’t be doing the story justice unless I returned to New York and explored what was happening to her. Her fate was just as important to me as her husband’s. Bowen is in search of indifference, a tranquil affirmation of things-as-they-are, whereas Eva is at war with those things, a victim of circumstances, and from the moment Nick fails to return from his errand around the corner, her mind becomes a storm field of conflicting emotions: panic and fear, sorrow and anger, despair. I relished the prospect of entering that misery, of knowing that I would be able to live those passions with her and write about them in the days ahead.
    Half an hour after the plane takes off from La Guardia, Nick opens his briefcase, slides out the manuscript of Sylvia Maxwell’s novel, and begins to read. That was the third element of the narrative that was taking shape in my head, and I decided that it should be introduced as early as possible – even before the plane lands in Kansas City. First, Nick’s story; then, Eva’s story; and finally, the book that Nick reads and continues to read as their stories unfold: the story within the story. Nick is a literary man, after all, and therefore someone susceptible to the power of books. Little by little, by force of the attention he brings to Sylvia Maxwell’s words, he begins to see a connection between himself and the story in the novel, as if in some oblique, highly metaphorical way, the book were speaking intimately to him about his own present circumstances.
    At that point, I had only the dimmest notion of what I wanted Oracle Night to be, no more than the first tentative tracings of an outline. Everything still had to be worked out concerning the plot, but I knew that it was supposed to be a brief philosophical novel about predicting the future, a fable about time. The protagonist is Lemuel Flagg, a British lieutenant blinded by a mortar explosion in the trenches of World War I. Bleeding from his wounds, disoriented and howling in pain, he wanders off from the battle and loses contact with his regiment. Thrashing forward, stumbling, with no idea where he is, he enters the Ardennes Forest and collapses to the ground. Later that same day, his unconscious body is discovered by two French children, an eleven-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl, François and Geneviève. They are war orphans who live on their own in an abandoned hut in the middle of the woods – pure fairy tale characters in a pure fairy-tale setting. They carry Flagg home and nurse him back to health, and when the war ends a few months later, he takes the children back to England with him. It is Geneviève who narrates the story, looking back from the vantage of 1927 at the strange career and eventual suicide of her adoptive father. Flagg’s blindness has given him the gift of prophecy. In sudden trancelike fits, he falls to the ground and begins flailing about like an epileptic. The seizures last from eight to ten minutes, and for the length of the time they endure, his mind is overrun with images of the future. The spells come upon him without warning, and there is nothing he can do to stop them or control them. His talent is both a curse and a blessing. It brings him wealth and influence, but at the same time the attacks cause him intense physical pain – not to speak of mental