of town and therefore does not bother to leave a message. There is no one left except his father, but just as Ellen is reluctant to involve her friend, he balks at the idea of dragging his father into this mess, his father is the last person in the world he wants to turn to for help now.
As if she is able to read his thoughts, Ellen says: You have to call your father, Miles.
He shakes his head. Impossible, he says. I’ve already put that man through enough.
If you won’t do it, Ellen says, then I will.
Please, Ellen. Leave him alone.
But Ellen insists, and a moment later she is dialing the number of Heller Books in Manhattan. Miles is so upset by what she is doing that he walks out of the kitchen and locks himself in the bathroom. He can’t bear to listen, he refuses to listen. He would rather stab himself in the heart than listen to Ellen talk to his father.
Time passes, how much time he doesn’t know, three minutes, eight minutes, two hours, and then Ellen is knocking on the door, telling him to come out, telling him that his father knows everything about what happened in Sunset Park this morning, that his father is waiting for him on the other end of the line. He unlocks the door, sees that Ellen’s eyes are rimmed with tears, gently touches her face with his left hand, and walks into the kitchen.
His father’s voice says: Two detectives came to the office about an hour ago. They say you broke a policeman’s jaw. Is that true?
He pushed Alice down the stairs, Miles says. I lost my temper.
Bing is in jail for resisting arrest. Alice is in the hospital with a concussion.
How bad is it?
She’s awake, her head hurts, but no permanent damage. They’ll probably let her out tomorrow morning.
To go where? She doesn’t have a place to live anymore. She’s homeless. We’re all homeless now.
I want you to turn yourself in, Miles.
No chance. They’d lock me up for years.
Extenuating circumstances. Police brutality. First offense. I doubt you’d serve any time.
It’s their word against ours. The cop will say Alice tripped and fell, and the jury will believe him. We’re just a bunch of illegal trespassers, squatters, freeloading bums.
You don’t want to spend the rest of your life running from the police, do you? You’ve already done enough running. Time to stand up and face the music, Miles. And I’ll stand up there with you.
You can’t. You have a good heart, Dad, but I’m in this thing alone.
No, you’re not. You’ll have a lawyer. And I know some damned good ones. Everything is going to be all right, believe me.
I’m so sorry. So fucking, terribly sorry.
Listen to me, Miles. Talking on the phone is no good. We have to hash it out in person, face to face. The minute I hang up, I’ll go straight home. Get yourself into a taxi and meet me there as soon as you can. All right?
All right.
You promise?
Yes, I promise.
Half an hour later, he is sitting in the backseat of a car-service Dodge, on his way to Downing Street in Manhattan. Ellen has gone to the bank for him with his ATM card and returned with a thousand dollars in cash, they have kissed and said good-bye, and as the car moves through the heavy traffic toward the Brooklyn Bridge, he wonders how long it will be before he sees Ellen Brice again. He wishes he could go to the hospital to see Alice, but he knows he can’t. He wishes he could go to the jail where Bing is locked up, but he knows he can’t. He presses the ice against his swollen hand, and as he looks at the hand, he thinks about the soldier with the missing hands in the movie he saw with Alice and Pilar last winter, the young soldier home from the war, unable to undress himself and go to bed without his father’s help, and he feels he has become that boy now, who can do nothing without his father’s help, a boy without hands, a boy who should be without hands, a boy whose hands have brought him nothing but trouble in his life, his angry punching hands, his angry pushing hands, and then the name of the soldier in the movie comes back to him, Homer, Homer Something, Homer as in the poet Homer, who wrote the scene about Odysseus and Telemachus, father and son reunited after so many years, in the same way he and his father have been reunited, and the name Homer makes him think of home, as in the word homeless, they are all homeless now, he said that to his father on the phone, Alice and Bing are homeless, he is homeless, the people in Florida who lived in the houses he trashed out are homeless, only Pilar is not homeless, he is her home now, and with one punch he has destroyed everything, they will never have their life together in New York, there is no future for them anymore, no hope for them anymore, and even if he runs away to Florida to be with her now, there will be no hope for them, and even if he stays in New York to fight it out in court, there will be no hope for them, he has let his father down, let Pilar down, let everyone down, and as the car travels across the Brooklyn Bridge and he looks at the immense buildings on the other side of the East River, he thinks about the missing buildings, the collapsed and burning buildings that no longer exist, the missing buildings and the missing hands, and he wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and from now on, he tells himself, he will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever.
Also by Paul Auster
Novels
The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room)
In the Country of Last Things
Moon Palace
The Music of Chance
Leviathan
Mr. Vertigo
Timbuktu
The Book of Illusions
Oracle Night
The Brooklyn Follies
Travels in the Scriptorium
Man in the Dark
Invisible
Nonfiction
The Invention of Solitude
The Art of Hunger
Why Write?
Hand to Mouth
The Red Notebook
Collected Prose
Screenplays
Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge
The Inner Life of Martin Frost
Poetry
Collected Poems
Illustrated Books
The Story of My Typewriter (with Sam Messer)
Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story (with Isol) City of Glass (adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli)
Editor
The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry
I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project
Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to the following:
Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, and their son, Felix.
Mark Costello.
Larry Siems and Sarah Hoffman of the PEN American Center.
My daughter, Sophie Auster, for her sixth-grade paper on To Kill a Mockingbird (1998).
Siri Hustvedt for the strangeness of being alive.
About the Author
PAUL AUSTER is the bestselling author of Invisible, Man in the Dark, and The Book of Illusions, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance), and the Edgar Award (City of Glass). His work has been translated into forty-one languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Copyright © 2010 by Paul Auster
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Auster, Paul, 1947–
Sunset Park / Paul Auster.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Frances Coady book.”
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9286-8
1. Young adults—Fiction. 2. Sunset Park (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.U77S86 2010
813'.54—dc22 2009045726
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.