Sunset Park - By Paul Auster Page 0,36

Gloria, Gloria and Frank Krushniak, the couple with the six children, but Frank’s war was different from the others’ war, he faked a disability and never had to serve, which means that he has nothing to say either, and when she thinks of that generation of silent men, the boys who lived through the Depression and grew up to become soldiers or not-soldiers in the war, she doesn’t blame them for refusing to talk, for not wanting to go back into the past, but how curious it is, she thinks, how sublimely incoherent that her generation, which doesn’t have much of anything to talk about yet, has produced men who never stop talking, men like Bing, for example, or men like Jake, who talks about himself at the slightest prompting, who has an opinion on every subject, who spews forth words from morning to night, but just because he talks, that doesn’t mean she wants to listen to him, whereas with the silent men, the old men, the ones who are nearly gone now, she would give anything to hear what they have to say.

Ellen Brice

She is standing on the front porch of the house, looking into the fog. It is Sunday morning, and the air outside is almost warm, too warm for the beginning of December, making it feel like a day from another season or another latitude, a damp, balmy sort of weather that reminds her of the tropics. When she looks across the street, the fog is so dense that the cemetery is invisible. A strange morning, she says to herself. The clouds have descended all the way to the ground, and the world has become invisible—which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, she decides, merely strange.

It is early, early for a Sunday in any case, a few minutes past seven o’clock, and Alice and Bing are still asleep in their beds on the second floor, but she is up at first light again as usual, even if there is little light to speak of on this dull, fog-saturated morning. She can’t remember the last time she managed to sleep for six full hours, six uninterrupted hours without waking from a rough dream or discovering her eyes had opened at dawn, and she knows these sleep difficulties are a bad sign, an unmistakable warning of trouble ahead, but in spite of what her mother keeps telling her, she doesn’t want to go back on the medication. Taking one of those pills is like swallowing a small dose of death. Once you start with those things, your days are turned into a numbing regimen of forgetfulness and confusion, and there isn’t a moment when you don’t feel your head is stuffed with cotton balls and wadded-up shreds of paper. She doesn’t want to shut down her life in order to survive her life. She wants her senses to be awake, to think thoughts that don’t vanish the moment they occur to her, to feel alive in all the ways she once felt alive. Crack-ups are off the agenda now. She can’t allow herself to surrender anymore, but in spite of her efforts to hold her ground in the here and now, the pressure has been building up inside her again, and she is beginning to feel twinges of the old panic, the knot in her throat, the blood rushing too quickly through her veins, the clenched heart and frantic rhythms of her pulse. Fear without an object, as Dr. Burnham once described it to her. No, she says to herself now: fear of dying without having lived.

There is no question that coming here was the right move, and she has never regretted leaving behind that small apartment on President Street in Park Slope. She feels emboldened by the risk they have taken together, and Bing and Alice have been so good to her, so generous and protective, so constant in their friendship, but in spite of the fact that she is less lonely now, there have been times, many times in fact, when being with them has only made things worse. When she lived on her own, she never had to compare herself with anyone. Her struggles were her struggles, her failures were her failures, and she could suffer through them within the confines of her small, solitary space. Now she is surrounded by impassioned, energetic people, and next to them she feels like a dim sluggard, a hopeless nonentity. Alice will soon have her