Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

return to his old life. In order to do that, he must accept a command to murder someone he has never met, a total stranger. He will have to accept, but once he gets to the other side, what is to prevent him from refusing to carry out the job?
    Still looking down at the table, he forces the words out of his mouth: Tell me something about the man.
    Ah, that’s better, Frisk says. Coming to our senses at last.
    Don’t patronize me, Frisk. Just tell me what I need to know.
    A retired book critic, seventy-two years old, living outside Brattleboro, Vermont, with his forty-seven-year-old daughter and twenty-three-year-old granddaughter. His wife died last year. The daughter’s husband left her five years ago. The granddaughter’s boyfriend was killed. It’s a house of grieving, wounded souls, and every night Brill lies awake in the dark, trying not to think about his past, making up stories about other worlds.
    Why is he in a wheelchair?
    A car accident. His left leg was shattered. They nearly had to amputate.
    And if I agree to kill this man, you’ll send me back.
    That’s the bargain. But don’t try to wriggle out of it, Brick. If you break your promise, we’ll come after you. Two bullets. One for you and one for Flora. Bang, bang. No more you. No more her.
    But if you get rid of me, the war goes on.
    Not necessarily. It’s still just a hypothesis at this point, but some of us think that getting rid of you would produce the same result as eliminating Brill. The story would end, and the war would be over. Don’t think we wouldn’t be willing to take the risk.
    How do I get back?
    In your sleep.
    But I’ve already gone to sleep here. Twice. And both times I woke up in the same place.
    That’s normal sleep. What I’m talking about is pharmacologically induced sleep. You’ll be given an injection. The effect is similar to anesthesia—when they put a person under before surgery. The black void of oblivion, a nothingness as deep and dark as death.
    Sounds like fun, Brick says, so unnerved by what is facing him that he can’t help cracking a feeble joke.
    Are you willing to give it a shot, Corporal?
    Do I have a choice?
    I feel a cough gathering in my chest, a faint rattle of phlegm buried deep in my bronchia, and before I can suppress it, the detonation comes blasting through my throat. Hack it up, propel the gunk northward, dislodge the slimy leftovers trapped in the tubes, but one try isn’t enough, nor two, nor three, and here I am in a full-blown spasm, my whole body convulsing from the onslaught. It’s my own fault. I stopped smoking fifteen years ago, but now that Katya is in the house with her ubiquitous American Spirits, I’ve begun to lapse into the old, dirty pleasures, cadging butts off her while we plunge through the entire corpus of world cinema, side by side on the sofa, blowing smoke in tandem, two locomotives chugging away from the loathsome, intolerable world, but without regret, I might add, without a second thought or single pang of remorse. It’s the companionship that counts, the conspiratorial bond, the fuckyou solidarity of the damned.
    Thinking about the films again, I realize that I have another example to add to Katya’s list. I must remember to tell her first thing tomorrow morning—in the dining room over breakfast—since it’s bound to please her, and if I can manage to coax a smile out of that glum face of hers, I’ll consider it a worthy accomplishment.
    The watch at the end of Tokyo Story. We saw the film a few days ago, the second time for both of us, but my first viewing goes decades back, the late sixties or early seventies, and other than remembering that I’d liked it, most of the story had vanished from my mind. Ozu, 1953, eight years after the Japanese defeat. A slow, stately film that tells the simplest of stories, but executed with such elegance and depth of feeling that I had tears in my eyes at the end. Some films are as good as books, as good as the best books (yes,