Free Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster Page B

the entire house. An instant later she let out a shriek, then grabbed hold of her left leg and started writhing around on the floor. “You dumb old bitch,” she said to herself. “You dumb old floozy bitch, now look what you done. You fell down the stairs and broke your goddamn leg.”
    For the next couple of weeks, the house was as gloomy as a hospital. There were two invalids to be taken care of, and the master and I spent our days rushing up and down the stairs, serving them their meals, emptying their potties, and doing everything short of wiping their bedridden asses. Aesop was in a funk of self-pity and dejection, Mother Sioux rained down curses on herself from morning to night, and what with the animals to be looked after in the barn and the rooms to be cleaned and the beds to be made and the dishes to be washed and the stove to be fed, there wasn’t so much as a minute left over for the master and me to do our work. Christmas was approaching, the time when I was supposed to be off the ground, and I was still as subject to the laws of gravity as I’d ever been. It was my darkest moment in over a year. I’d been turned into a regularcitizen who did his chores and knew how to read and write, and if it went on any longer, I’d probably wind up taking elocution lessons and joining the Boy Scouts.
    One morning, I woke up a little earlier than usual. I checked in on Aesop and Mother Sioux, saw that they were both still asleep, and tiptoed down the stairs, intending to surprise the master with my predawn levee. Ordinarily, he would have been down in the kitchen at that hour, cooking breakfast and preparing to start the day. But there were no smells of coffee wafting up from the stove, no sounds of bacon crackling in the pan, and sure enough, when I entered the room it turned out to be empty. He’s in the barn, I told myself, gathering eggs or milking one of the cows, but then I realized that the stove had not been lit. Starting the fire was the first order of business on winter mornings, and the temperature downstairs was frigid, cold enough for me to send forth a burst of vapor every time I exhaled. Well, I continued to myself, maybe the old guy is fagged out and wanted to catch up on his beauty sleep. That would certainly put a new twist on things, wouldn’t it? For me to be the one to rouse him from bed instead of vice versa. So I went back upstairs and knocked on his bedroom door, and when there was no response after several tries, I opened the door and gingerly stepped across the threshold. Master Yehudi was nowhere to be found. Not only was he not in his bed, but the bed itself was neatly made and bore no signs of having been slept in that night. He’s run out on us, I said to myself. He’s upped and skedaddled, and that’s the last we’ll ever see of him.
    For the next hour, my mind was a free-for-all of desperate thoughts. I spun from sorrow to anger, from belligerence to laughter, from snarling grief to vile self-mockery. The universe had gone up in smoke, and I was left to dwell among the ashes, alone forever among the smoldering ruins of betrayal.
    Mother Sioux and Aesop slept on in their beds, oblivious to my rantings and my tears. Somehow or other (I can’t remember how I got there), I was down in the kitchen again, lying on my stomach with my face pressed against the floor, rubbing my nose into the filthy wooden planks. There were no more tears to be gotten out of me—only a dry, choked heaving, an aftermath of hiccups and scorched, airless breaths. Presently I grew still, almost tranquil, and bit by bit a sense of calm spread through me, radiating out among my muscles and oozing toward the tips of my fingers and toes. There were no more thoughts in my head, no more feelings in my heart. I was weightless inside my own body, floating on a placid wave of nothingness, utterly detached and indifferent to the world around me. And that’s when I did it for the first time—without warning, without the