Free Oracle Night by Paul Auster Page B

transparent elevators and immense chandeliers and burnished metallic walls, and he with nothing but the clothes on his back, two credit cards in his wallet, and a half-read novel in his leather bag. He splurges on a suite, rides the elevator up to the tenth floor, and doesn’t come down again for thirty-six hours. Naked under his hotel robe, he eats room service meals, stands by the window, studies himself in the bathroom mirror, and reads Sylvia Maxwell’s book. He finishes it that first night before going to bed, and then he spends the entire next day reading it again, and then again, and then a fourth time, plowing through its two hundred and nineteen pages as if his very life depended on it. The story of Lemuel Flagg affects him deeply, but Bowen doesn’t read Oracle Night because he is looking to be moved or entertained, and he doesn’t immerse himself in the novel in order to put off making a decision about what to do next. He knows what he has to do next, and the book is the only means at hand with which to do it. He has to train himself not to think about the past. That’s the key to the whole mad adventure that started for him when the gargoyle crashed to the sidewalk. If he has lost his old life, then he must act as if he has just been born, pretend that he is no more burdened by the past than an infant is. He has memories, of course, but those memories are no longer relevant, no longer a part of the life that has begun for him, and whenever he finds himself drifting into thoughts about his old life in New York – which has been erased, which is nothing more than illusion now – he does everything in his power to turn his mind from the past and concentrate on the present. That is why he reads the book. That is why he keeps reading the book. He must lure himself away from the false memories of a life that no longer belongs to him, and because the manuscript demands total surrender in order to be read, an unremitting attentiveness of both body and mind, he can forget who he was when he is lost in the pages of the novel.
    On the third day, Nick finally ventures outside. He walks down the street, enters a men’s clothing store, and spends the next hour browsing among the racks, shelves, and bins. Little by little, he pieces together a new wardrobe for himself, loading up on everything from pants and shirts to underwear and socks. When he hands the clerk his American Express card to pay the bill, however, the machine rejects the card. The account has been canceled, the clerk informs him. Nick is thrown by this unexpected development, but he pretends to take it in his stride. It doesn’t matter, he says. I’ll pay with my Visa card. But when the clerk swipes that one through the machine, it proves to be invalid as well. It’s an embarrassing moment for Nick. He wants to make a joke about it, but no funny remarks spring to mind. He apologizes to the clerk for having inconvenienced him and then turns around and leaves the store.
    The snafu is easily explained. Bowen has already figured it out before he returns to the hotel, and once he understands why Eva canceled the cards, he grudgingly admits that he would have done the same thing in her place. A husband goes out to mail a letter and doesn’t come back. What is the wife to think? Desertion is a possibility, of course, but that thought wouldn’t come until later. The first response would be alarm, and then the wife would run through a catalogue of potential accidents and dangers. Hit by a truck, knifed in the back, robbed at gunpoint and then knocked on the head. And if her husband was the victim of a robbery, then the thief would have taken his wallet and walked off with his credit cards. With no evidence to support one hypothesis or another (no reports of a crime, no dead bodies found in the street), canceling the credit cards would have been a minimum precaution.
    Nick has only sixty-eight dollars in cash. He has no checks with him, and when he stops at an