Man in the Dark by Paul Auster Page B

same time I can’t be here, can I? I belong somewhere else.
    You’re here, all right. And you belong somewhere else.
    It can’t be both. It has to be one or the other.
    Is the name Giordano Bruno familiar to you?
    No. Never heard of him.
    A sixteenth-century Italian philosopher. He argued that if God is infinite, and if the powers of God are infinite, then there must be an infinite number of worlds.
    I suppose that makes sense. Assuming you believe in God.
    He was burned at the stake for that idea. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong, does it?
    Why ask me? I don’t know the first thing about any of this. How can I have an opinion about something I don’t understand?
    Until you woke up in that hole the other day, your entire life had been spent in one world. But how could you be sure it was the only world?
    Because . . . because it was the only world I ever knew.
    But now you know another world. What does that suggest to you, Brick?
    I don’t follow.
    There’s no single reality, Corporal. There are many realities. There’s no single world. There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of a mind.
    You’re beginning to sound like Tobak. He said the war was in one man’s head, and if that man was eliminated, the war would stop. That’s about the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.
    Tobak might not be the brightest soldier in the army, but he was telling you the truth.
    If you want me to believe a crazy thing like that, you’ll have to prove it to me first.
    All right, Frisk says, slapping his palms on the table, what about this? Without another word, he reaches under his sweater with his right hand and pulls out a three-by-five photograph from his shirt pocket. This is the culprit, he says, sliding the photo across the table to Brick.
    Brick does no more than glance at the picture. It’s a color snapshot of a man in his late sixties or early seventies sitting in a wheelchair in front of a white country house. A perfectly sympathetic-looking man, Brick notes, with spiky gray hair and a weathered face.
    This doesn’t prove anything, he says, thrusting the photo back at Frisk. It’s just a man. Any man. For all I know, he could be your uncle.
    His name is August Brill, Frisk begins, but Brick cuts him off before he can say anything else.
    Not according to Tobak. He said his name was Blake.
    Blank.
    Whatever.
    Tobak isn’t up on the latest intelligence reports. For a long time, Blank was our leading suspect, but then we crossed him off the list. Brill is the one. We’re sure of that now.
    Then show me the story. Reach into that bag of yours and pull out his manuscript and point to a sentence where my name is mentioned.
    That’s the problem. Brill doesn’t write anything down. He’s telling himself the story in his head.
    How can you possibly know that?
    A military secret. But we know, Corporal. Trust me.
    Bullshit.
    You want to go back, don’t you? Well, this is the only way. If you don’t accept the job, you’ll be stuck here forever.
    All right. Just for the sake of argument, imagine I shoot this man . . . this Brill. Then what happens? If he created your world, then the moment he’s dead, you won’t exist anymore.
    He didn’t invent this world. He only invented the war. And he invented you, Brick. Don’t you understand that? This is your story, not ours. The old man invented you in order to kill him.
    So now it’s a suicide.
    In a roundabout way, yes.
    Once again, Brick puts his head in his hands and begins to moan. It’s all too much for him, and after struggling to hold his ground against Frisk’s demented assertions, he can feel his mind dissolving, whirling madly through a universe of disconnected thoughts and amorphous dreads. Only one thing is clear to him: he wants to go back. He wants to be with Flora again and